Cyberpunk, as a subgenre of science fiction, speculates more about socioeconomics than it does technology. While imaginary gadgets of all sorts still populate cyberpunk settings, the genre predicates those settings upon worldbuilding features such as transnational monopolies and governments dominated by corporate interests, exaggerating the trends witnessed in our late-capitalist reality. As illustrated by the omnipresence of massive metropolitan spaces in tentpole films like Blade Runner (1982) and AKIRA (1988), cyberpunk often juxtaposes high-rise buildings with street-level slums to illustrate inequity within its speculative dystopian futures, stratifying socioeconomic classes along a vertical axis. When analyzing the architectural and urban planning tropes of cyberpunk cities, Caroline Alphin refers to cyberpunk urban centers as “necroscapes,” places of omnipresent danger that prove lethal to resident populations (93). That lethality can arise rapidly, say in the form of gun violence, or slowly, through things such as industrial air pollution. Either way, those who occupy necroscapes face pressures that increase their likelihood of a premature death.
Cyberpunk’s penchant for representing wealth and poverty as a matter of “up versus down” generally results in the depiction of lofty spaces such as high-rises as bastions of security, while lower spaces like city streets carry countless dangers. However, while cyberpunk media almost always foregrounds the societal violences of extreme inequality, those violences are not always neatly contained to the streets. An early scene in RoboCop (1987) presents a example wherein cyberpunk’s thematic concerns of corporate greed and government privatization give rise to violence within a supposedly secure space of an upper-class corporate high-rise. As I’ll unpack below, RoboCop’s depiction of the violent killing of a wealthy bureaucrat during a boardroom meeting can add nuance to our understanding of the spatial arguments in cyberpunk’s representations of urban design: namely that cyberpunk does not relegate the violence of its necroscapes to the lowly realm of the streets—in fact, this scene from RoboCop insists that necroscapes envelop society as a whole, including the socioeconomic elite.
| Fig. 1: RoboCop, 00:08:10. |
In the RoboCop scene, a scaled down model of the utopian urban revitalization project known as Delta City occupies the foreground of the frame (fig. 1) before the scene shifts toward what would now be referred to as a “big tech takeover” of Detroit’s local police force. Executives and business partners of Omni Consumer Products (OCP) listen while the company’s unnamed CEO remarks that “Although shifts in tax structure have created an economy ideal for corporate growth, community services, in this case law enforcement, have suffered.” Infused with irony and foreshadowing the upcoming moment of gory satire, the CEO states “I think it’s time we gave something back” before another businessman, Dick Jones, introduces a bipedal tank-like robot called ED-209, a “24-hour-a-day police officer” that needs neither sleep nor meals. A handgun disarming demonstration with the robot goes awry and the hesitant volunteer who held the gun to ED-209, Mr. Kinney, gets shot repeatedly as the boardroom watches in horror and technicians fail to disable the robot (fig. 2). Excessive spurts of blood and chunks of flesh fly about the room in the film’s unrated director’s cut, but even in the toned-down theatrical release, the thoroughly bloodied Mr. Kinney gets thrown back by the gunfire, landing upon the table displaying the model of Delta City, literally shattering OCP’s corporate-utopian visions of future Detroit, staining its white plastics with his viscera. During his presentation before this incident, Dick Jones had noted that while policing generally functions as a public service, OCP often successfully “gambled in markets traditionally regarded as nonprofit. Hospitals, prisons, space exploration.” He continues, “I say good business is where you find it.”
| Fig. 2: RoboCop, 00:12:24, cropped. |
Within cyberpunk’s necroscapes, everyone and everything is good business, or at least a resource for good business. After some initial gasps, several businessmen present in the boardroom resume discussions as usual, one making a successful pitch to the CEO to forego the now-embarrassed ED-209 project to instead fund the film’s eponymous RoboCop program. The ED-209 crisis makes RoboCop appear ever more the opportunity. The fatal malfunctions just witnessed signify to OCP executives only that they need to innovate policing with a new product, rather than prompting consideration of their involvement in and militarization of policing to begin with. The terrible irony that permeates this scene stems from its satirical reinforcement of corporate hubris in the face of a shocking event that should cause dispute; the CEO’s remarks about “an economy ideal for corporate growth” echo the deregulatory policies of the Reagan administration contemporary to the film. With public services in disrepair both in RoboCop’s fiction and the realities it reflects, corporations posture as saviors to communities facing crises of crime and poverty, but pose solutions through profit-driven systems, as opposed to the nonprofit systems of social benefit that OCP declares it has successfully dominated.
While Mr. Kinney’s bloody crash upon the Delta City model shatters the allure of technologized business solutions for socioeconomic problems only momentarily for the characters in the scene, this incident confronts audiences with a striking representation of the “infrastructural brutalism” that Truscello discusses in his book of the same name. He says the term describes “the historical context in which industrial capitalism has met the limits of its expansion and domination, and yet continues to press for unprecedented commitments to build more” (Truscello 4). The bloodied, shattered Delta City model illustrates that even when such violent tragedies transpire on the human level, the broader systems undergirding corporatism keep ticking along, keep pressing for those “unprecedented commitments” by constructing naïve aspirations such as utopian future cities rather than attempts to resolve the issues already at hand. Infrastructural brutalism—in other words, capitalism’s overextensions—actualizes frequently in the form of “exciting” new products (such as Delta City, ED-209, or RoboCop himself) that corporations successfully market as solutions regardless of their actual viability when deployed within the communities that they will affect.
| Fig. 3: RoboCop, 00:11:59. |
Just before the shooting, in an over-the-shoulder shot that aligns the robot’s gun barrels, Mr. Kinney, Delta City, and Detroit itself through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the high-rise boardroom, the many businesspeople scatter about in fear and surprise (fig. 3). However, opposite to Mr. Kinney’s rightward presence on the screen, the OCP CEO appears calm in the background of the upper left, sitting at the head of the conference table whereas the others have all sprung up in fear, resting his chin upon his hands with haunting indifference. Unnamed, referred to by others simply as “the Old Man,” the CEO functions less as a character and more as a figurative representation of the institutional drive and will of OCP as a corporation. Though an employee of OCP, Mr. Kinney remained expendable. As Carlen Lavigne explains, cyberpunk is “closely associated with North American economic and labor concerns of the 1980s; its citizens, devalued as interchangeable and easily replaceable assets within corporate society” (12). Illustrated by the abundance of his suited coworkers in the scene, within a necroscape even those who have climbed the corporate ladder often function as surplus populations, described by Marx as “a relatively redundant working population . . . superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization” (782). Alphin attests that present day neoliberal capitalist governments “eliminate surplus bodies that fail to function in the production of value” (1). With Mr. Kinney, it becomes apparent that even those ostensibly contributing to the production of value remain expendable within the full systemic scope of a corporation like OCP.
Alongside this scene’s visual foregrounding of the Delta City model, the prominently featured floor-to-ceiling windows maintain the presence of actual Detroit[1] in the background as members of the boardroom rather nonchalantly make investment and technological development decisions in a corporate space vertically removed from the populace of the city itself. Furthermore, the exaggerated verticality pictured by the central towers of Delta City declare an intent for an even further distancing between this controlling class of corporate executives and the Detroit citizenry. ED-209 targeting Mr. Kinney depicts not only malfunction, but disregard for collateral damage—satirical in the self-destructive crushing of Delta City, and symbolic in its taking aim upon Detroit in the distance.
In addressing cyberpunk’s imaginary worlds, I suggest that the capitalist overextensions that Truscello terms as “infrastructural brutalism” drive the elimination of the surplus bodies that this kind of societal organization kills “in subtle and overt ways” (Alphin 93). Tendencies toward deregulatory policy, alongside incentives for continuous corporate growth that disincentivize sustainable planning, establish conditions that devalue lives—not only the lives of the lower classes who in the RoboCop example would be policed by the violent machines onscreen, but even the lives of those integrated into corporate hegemony, like Mr. Kinney. Thus, infrastructural brutalism permits indiscriminate brutality.
Notes
[1] The “actual Detroit” of the fiction, at least. In reality, the window featured in figs. 8 and 9 overlooks Dallas, Texas, the film’s boardroom set located on the 54th floor of the city’s Rennaisance Tower (Maschino and Gallagher).
Works Cited
AKIRA. Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, Toho, 1988.
Alphin, Caroline. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Living on the Edge of Burnout. Routledge, 2021.
Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott. Warner Brothers, 1982. The Final Cut, 2007.
Maschino, Brian, and Danny Gallagher. “RoboCop Versus Reality: Looking at Dallas Locations of the Film’s Scenes.” Dallas Observer, 11 July 2017, https://www.dallasobserver.com/slideshow/robocop-versus-reality-looking-at-dallas-locations-of-the-films-scenes-9647490/9647497. Accessed 8 Apr. 2025.
RoboCop. Directed by Peter Weller, Orion Pictures, 1987. Director’s Cut, 1995.
Truscello, Michael. Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure. MIT P, 2020.